INDUSTRY

COMPANY

Inside D.C. Water's Culture of Innovation

D.C. Water is undergoing several big projects, including becoming the first to use thermal hydrolysis in the United States. (Photos by David Kidd) View Article

D.C. Water is adopting Norway's Cambi system at its advanced waste treatment plant, heating waste to create and capture methane that's then burned to generate electricity. These stainless steel vessels heat the sludge to 320 degrees before moving it to four large concrete tanks called anaerobic digesters. (Photos by David Kidd)

To inspect the anaerobic digesters, workers must use ladders to climb in and out of the tanks. The technology D.C. Water is using is called thermal hydrolysis. Once the system is completed, it will be the largest thermal hydrolysis plant in the world.

Chris Peot, director of resource recovery at D.C. Water, climbs into one of the digesters. The tanks are about 75 feet tall and 100 feet in diameter.

These vast, domed tanks will eventually be filled with the District's waste. The blue vertical tubes suck the sludge from the bottom and spits it back out near the top. The sludge will stew in these tanks for about two weeks, producing methane that vents out a pipe at the dome.

The steel centrifuges drain any liquid from the waste as it first enters the process. From here, the sludge flows into the two-dozen stainless steel tanks.

Construction is still ongoing at the waste treatment plant. D.C. Water expects the plant to be fully operational by 2015.

The $460-million project is part of a culture of innovation at the agency. D.C. Water has also pursued groundbreaking customer solutions to generate more precise meter readings and is planning on issuing the first municipal "century bond" this year.

D.C. Water is the local electricity company's No. 1 customer. But once completed, the thermal hydrolysis process will cut the agency's electricity bill by about one-third or $10 million a year.

One of the four anaerobic digesters.

The view from the top of a digester tank.

An overview of the sedimentation basins at the plant. Part of the liquid side of the waste treatment process, these basins separate out the solids containing carbon and nutrients.

The methane generated from the digesters fires three jet turbine engines and produces electricity. A byproduct of that process is steam, which is fed back into the plant.